Holocaust Exploited

An emaciated death camp survivor stares blankly alongside a
gaunt steer. "During the seven years between 1938 and 1945, 12 million people
perished in the Holocaust," the image declares. "The same number of animals is
killed every 4 hours for food in the U.S. alone."

The poster forms the heart of a new national campaign
launched last week by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) that
compares the Holocaust and the meat industry -- and that is ruffling Jewish
feathers.

Dubbed "The Holocaust on Your Plate," PETA's campaign and
its companion Web site, www.masskilling.com, insists the Nazi murder of Jews, gays
and Gypsies mirrors "the modern-day Holocaust" that is the industrialized
slaughter of animals for food.

Just as the Nazis forced Jews to live in cramped, filthy
conditions, tore children from parents and murdered people in "assembly-line
fashion," factory farms cram animals into tiny, waste-filled spaces, treating
cows, chicken and lambs as meat-, egg- and milk-producing machines, PETA says.

"It's a direct parallel," said Matt Prescott, PETA's youth
outreach coordinator and one of the campaign's creators with relatives who died
in the Holocaust.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles, called the Holocaust comparison "ridiculous." "No responsible
Jewish leader will have anything against a campaign that seeks to limit the abuse
and torture of animals," Hier said. "But putting on a Web site the images of
the death camps, and comparing it to chickens cooped up in a pen, it denigrates
the memory of the Holocaust."

But PETA remains adamant that the "similarities" between the
Holocaust and factory farming are worth exploring, Prescott said.

"We're trying to widen the circle of compassion, and
sometimes a person has to be shocked before they can begin to accept their own
role in an act of injustice," he said.

JewishJournal.com is produced by TRIBE Media Corp., a non-profit media company whose mission is to inform, connect and enlighten community
through independent journalism. TRIBE Media produces the 150,000-reader print weekly Jewish Journal in Los Angeles – the largest Jewish print
weekly in the West – and the monthly glossy Tribe magazine (TribeJournal.com). Please support us by clicking here.